


Pure Empathy

by StumbleineSuperqueen



Series: Speculative Fiction [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M, Memory Palace Shenanigans, mostly nice lovey sex, we just don't know, what is the difference between pure empathy & being straight up psychic, who'sssssss ready to TAKE SOME THINGS TO THEIR LOGICAL CONCLUSIONS??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 19:13:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7769776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StumbleineSuperqueen/pseuds/StumbleineSuperqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A theory had come to him recently: this gift, that allowed him to stand in the midst of chaos and watch it flow backward, that allowed him to be the man who had orchestrated it, perhaps did not have to be released like an act of God, like a flood that swept him away. Perhaps it could be directed. Used like a scalpel rather than a broadsword. It would be more useful that way.</p><p>"Would you like to help me test it?" Will asks.</p><p>Hannibal looks at him searchingly. "Yes."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pure Empathy

Will Graham is playing a game. He sits on the couch in the living room, holding a cup of coffee close, breathing the steam, reaching out with his empathy. A theory had come to him recently: this gift, that allowed him to stand in the midst of chaos and watch it flow backward, that allowed him to _be_ the man who had orchestrated it, perhaps did not have to be released like an act of God, like a flood that swept him away. Perhaps it could be directed. Used like a scalpel rather than a broadsword. It would be more useful that way.

He closes his eyes and lets his breath out slowly like a hunter lining up a shot. In the kitchen behind him he hears Hannibal moving. He focuses on him, on his footsteps, on his breathing, his inhale, his exhale, his inhale, and he looks into the living room and wonders what Will is doing there, bent over his cup like that, still as a statue. The pale light of the early morning picks out dust motes in the air, catches shining in his lovely curls, _how beautiful he is, my darling, my Will._

Will opens his eyes when he hears Hannibal's sounds abruptly cease.

"Will?"

"Yes?"

Hannibal walks into the living room and sits down beside him, looking into his face intently. Will sets his coffee cup on the table and turns back to face him, his eyes still sleepy, his glasses dirty, bold scars all up and down his bare torso, the soft curls of hair that lead into his pajamas, he is looking at Hannibal oddly and Hannibal feels that something is different, something is happening but he can't...quite...place it.

"What are you doing, Will?" he asks.

Will considers, and answers him honestly. "Experimenting."

Hannibal cocks his head in the way he does when he comes across something interesting.

"Can you feel it?"

"Yes."

"You're the first one who ever has."

"That you are aware of." Hannibal sips his own coffee. "I merely recognized it for what it was. The feeling of you inside me. Sometimes in my cell, three or four in the morning, I could feel it, and it kept me from sleep knowing you were so near. I could feel you walking in the outer rooms of my memory palace, not touching, just taking things in. I did not go looking for you. You were not there to see me." He pauses. "It is a distinctive feeling. Easily placed."

Will is surprised and mildly unsettled by this revelation. He had not known until much later that the strange places he found himself in when he lost himself in his longing for Hannibal at night, first alone, then later lying awake next to Molly's sleeping body, were...real, in a sense. Hannibal had spoken frequently of the memory palace, but it was not until he walked through a door in what he thought was a dream and found himself in that fateful chapel in Palermo that he realized to whom the dream belonged. When Hannibal had said before their three-year parting that their palaces shared rooms, that he had discovered him there, Will had no idea at the time that he was being quite literal.

"Would you like to help me test it?" Will asks.

Hannibal looks at him searchingly. "Yes."

Will closes his eyes again. He sinks into the couch and tries to feel into Hannibal, tries to feel the warmth of the mug in his hands and sits back to observe Will. He is breathing deeply as if hypnotized. Hannibal leans over to see his face: his eyes are open, barely, pinpoint pupils in his gray-blue eyes jittering back and forth like a dreamer's. He puts down his mug and lays a hand on Will's shoulder, and jumps at Hannibal's touch, startled out of his concentration.

"Come with me," Hannibal says.

 

They walk into the bedroom and sit down on the bed.

"I can watch through you," Will says thoughtfully, "but that's not what I want."

"You want to feel our connection," Hannibal says, "to see it stretched between us like the proverbial red string of fate imagined by the Chinese. You would reel it in, find the shortest distance between us."

Will studies him, nods.

"Perhaps you would be aided by a physical connection." Hannibal kisses him, and feels the curve of his upper lip, his pointed little eye teeth, his stubble, his smooth fresh-shaven face, tastes black coffee and coffee with cream, no sugar, feels a tongue caress his tongue caress his tongue caress his tongue.

Will sits back, breathing heavily. Hannibal licks his lips.

"Like a lamp between two mirrors," he observes.

"Yes."

"You are accustomed to stepping into others, but have you ever felt that the person whom you entered was entering you also?"

"No." Will is also thinking about this. "That part is new. All the others have been..." He is about to say _psychopaths._ "Not anyone I wanted a two-way connection with."

"Thank God for small mercies," Hannibal says. "Then it may be you have always had some degree of choice in the matter. You needed only to touch someone by whom you wanted to be touched."

"I don't know." Will exhales. "I told you once...after I killed Hobbs, that in getting inside his head I began to think we were doing the same things at the same times of day. That we were merging. And after I killed him...I felt nearly possessed."

"There were extenuating circumstances."

"Maybe. Maybe some people are open, and others are closed. Maybe my self was weak, and his self was strong."

"Many people use the method of loci to store information spatially for easy recollection. Many people...but few, if any, with palaces like mine: a place to retreat, a place that can be as real as the bed we sit on to me, if I so desire. And no one, Will, has ever entered my palace, the very chambers of my mind, except you. You are exceptional in your ability to connect. Your gift is very strong, very rare, unheard of."

Will does not like to think of himself as special, but he can not deny he is...different. Hannibal is also different. Sometimes he feels they are the opposite but equal halves of one soul, two poles of a magnet. When they met the process of melding began automatically, like a chemical reaction. They began to equalize. Will grew darker, or grew aware of the darkness; Hannibal grew...lighter. He acquired some of Will's empathy; Will acquired some of his antipathy. Maybe now they had drawn close enough to bridge the gap.

"Do you wish to continue?" Hannibal asks after a while. They had both been lost in thought.

Will rouses himself. "Yes. Let's...continue. If I become overwhelmed, it usually looks very much like a PTSD episode, in my experience. The plan we've worked out for those should help bring me back."

Hannibal nods. "I promise to reel you in by the red string, Will."

"Fated lovers," Will says, half to himself. He is wearing only loose pajama pants, which he sheds now, climbing under the covers into the spot he had only recently vacated. Hannibal takes off his robe and hangs it from the hook on the bathroom door. He pulls the cord to turn the overhead fan on to low, then hits the switch on the wall so that the natural light diffusing through the white gauze curtains is the only thing illuminating the room. They have very little furniture. Most of the house is empty space and white walls. It looks pure and clear now.

"This reminds me of something," Will says, as Hannibal slides in next to him. "I dropped acid once, with a girlfriend. In college, as you might guess." He smiles at his past self. "The ritual of preparing to take psychedelic drugs is part of the experience. Safeguarding the environment for the child you're about to become. Creating the safe, comfortable place you would want the world to be if you came to it with a blank slate. Just like this."

"That was before...everything. My head was clean. I went in unafraid. It was beautiful there, and she was beautiful there, naked inside and out. I thought that was the closest I would ever be to truly touching another person's heart. We forgot everything: we had to name things like Adam and Eve. When I looked in the mirror, I didn't see my own face. I saw the face of Will Graham. He was a young boy with a mustache that was practically peach fuzz, shaggy curls, a scrawny frame. I loved him, and I pitied him, and I wanted him to be happy."

"Was he happy in the end?" Hannibal asks, tilting his face up by the chin. Will looks into his burgundy eyes and sees his own blue-grey ones looking into them.

"Yes."

For the second time they kiss, and for the second time he cannot not tell where Will Graham ends and Hannibal Lecter begins, or which name he belongs to. He exists only while the lips of those two men meet, and in their connection he feels a reflection of the holiness of Will Graham's long ago acid trip. The unobstructed meeting of two souls.

They kiss deeply, gently, sincerely for a long time—holding Will's slighter body to his more solid chest, letting his hands wander through Hannibal's hair, down his back, skimming his fingers over the circle of scar tissue there in the shape of the Verger crest and experiencing instantly the agony of the white hot brand on his flesh. Will breaks away, panting. For a moment he had felt blind panic in the face of Hannibal's remembered pain.

Hannibal holds him closer, lets him bury his face in the crook of his neck. "You know already, Will, that there will be things in me you will not enjoy touching," he says. He strokes Will's hair. "There are things that will sink into you deeper than Mason's brand did me. For me they are old scars, as healed as they will ever be...for you they will be new, and piercing. Perhaps also you will be wounded the deeper for having more capacity for injury."

Will is catching up to his breath, calming himself with the familiar scent of Hannibal's skin. "You might also burn yourself," he says, remembering with a rueful smile that this too was a necessary, definitive aspect of this kind of closeness. "I may have more depth of feeling to plumb...but you will too, when you cross over there. I don't know how your brain might react to experiencing emotions you may literally not possess the ability to feel."

Hannibal thinks this over as Will, still fully intending to go forward if Hannibal would too, began to steel himself for another attempt. _I'm not nineteen years old anymore,_ he reminds himself. _You don't live without getting a couple bruises. More than a couple, in my case._ He knows what Hannibal's decision about going on will be. Hannibal could always be counted on to sacrifice comfort in the name of collecting fresh experiences.

 _Just like tripping,_ Will thinks. _Think happy thoughts. Good vibes._

This time, they start by just touching. The way Hannibal experiences Will's body delights him: he sees himself divine, precious, traces every curve of Will's body, his territory, his, his, the man he turned himself inside out for. In Hannibal's mind Will sees himself standing like the white-robed woman on the Strength trump, crowned with the infinite lemniscate, gracefully bending to shut the jaws of the lion. Tamed with soft persuasion, the lion is kept in place with merely a delicate rope of flowers, bound sweetly about her waist. Will sees her, her downcast eyes, her peaceful Mother Mary face. He sees her in himself.

 _The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust_ shall be _the serpent's meat,_ Will thinks because Hannibal thinks. _They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lᴏʀᴅ._

Will traces Hannibal's jaw, semi-conscious of echoing back with his action the words and images that are flooding unbidden into his mind. The little part that is Will is not overwhelmed yet, but Hannibal's mind _is_ overwhelming: _associations come quickly so do forts no forts in the bone arena_ _you remember? of course my darling dear but did_ you _remember before now I don't know I don't remember if I remembered maybe it was me in the first place_ everything triggers everything and an avalanche of information is pouring down on Will. He has vastly underestimated the capacity of his lover's mind. Nearly everything Hannibal has ever seen or done, heard or said is here, impenetrably webbed together, confronting him at every turn. He has no idea how Hannibal can process this into anything intelligible in daily life.

He feels himself kiss down his neck feels Hannibal's lips brushing over Will's collarbones closes his lips over his nipple and sucks, and Hannibal feels an electric jolt of pleasure down his spine, and Will feels him feel him feel it and moans. Everything is doubled conjoined one and the same from outside themselves he sees the bed as if through a kaleidoscope. Someone's hand slides down along the curve of someone's waist _you're perfect_ and Will feels Hannibal squeezing his ass, teasing him with his fingers, ticklish shiver behind his ribcage they are both being opened, entered, gasping with the painpleasure—

"Lube," Will says suddenly, then laughs. It seems silly that he should be able to abruptly come back to himself to deal with such a practical concern. Even from this small dose of unrestrained empathy, his head is spinning; he feels drunk and giddy.

Hannibal does not feel much more grounded, but he somehow finds the presence of mind to ask: "This is what you want, Will?"

Will stares at him. Right now the idea that Hannibal should have to ask him his opinion on anything strikes him as bizarre. He closes his eyes and takes several deep breaths, trying to steady himself, trying to be Will Graham, and remember what Will Graham might usually want under these circumstances. _Will Graham has never been in these circumstances. Except for...now. And right now..._ "Yes," he says, clearing his throat. "Yes, I want this, Hannibal."

"All right." He takes the lube from the bedside drawer and slicks his fingers. "From the top, then."

Will moves back in against him. Hannibal's mental prowess is laser-guided, mechanical; his has always felt more organic, something that just _happens_ to him, a cursed gift that could be held at bay by avoiding triggers, or triggered purposely if reluctantly in the service of the FBI, something he suffered through only to keep the bodies off his conscience. He supposes that control makes Hannibal feel responsible for this little party. Duality again.

But dammit...he has suffered long enough. Now he wants to see what his brain can do for him.

Hannibal reaches over his hip and runs his fingers up to his hole, rubbing up and down with careful pressure _the natural instinct to reject weakness_ Will arches Hannibal's back and sighs deep as he feels his lover push inside him, inside him _being inside him brings this old sinner closer to God than he'll ever get we'll never be enslaved in a Heaven_ it's so sweet, so good, he twists against him and begs for more, "oh...Hannibal...you...I..."

"I know," Hannibal manages, "I can...feel..." He breaks off, operating his mouth feels odd his tongue presses against his teeth Will is so high, he can feel his high, he wants it, he wants more more fingers inside him and he obliges himself, and Hannibal doesn't know whose brain sends the order flowing down his brainstem but it feels so _good_ and it had been a long, long, long time since he has felt this particular sensation _oh my love I would do anything for you to you I want you every way there is_ he moves deeper into him, further, feeling for the sweet spot, suddenly he wants to make this happen _I want you my darling dear one one and only—_

His limbs as heavy as a sleepwalker's, Hannibal can only haltingly direct his body the way he it needs to go. He feels as though he is engaging in a game of telephone, like the decisions he makes to get more lube and cover himself in it and pull Will close must first bounce back and forth between their brains before finally hitting the bullseye of his own motor cortex.

The high of blurring with Will is addictive. His love for Will is far and away the strongest emotion, strongest _anything_ he's ever felt. This is the feeling of completion Will gives him made literal and multiplied a thousandfold. He drops to his hands and knees over Will and leans down to kiss him.

Slowly he begins to push into Will. Hannibal feels Will tight and slick around his cock, feels a little twinge, feels the old familiar aching stretch of being entered. He leans into the sensation, releasing as much tension from his body as he can while still pushing forward. Will sighs "ohh..." and shifts his hips, trying to allow Hannibal deeper inside him. Hannibal loops an arm behind one of Will's knees and gently presses it in towards his chest, trying to loosen his pelvis gradually. Hannibal closes his eyes and...

...he isn't sure if he _is_ Hannibal Lecter, or if he is Will Graham. He remembers how desperately he imagined this, for how long, he remembers watching Will Graham doing things like running a hand through his curls or polishing his glasses and he remembers thinking: _What is this? What is this?_ But he remembers watching Hannibal Lecter deftly handling a chef's knife, looking down, absorbed in his work, and thinking: _Sometimes he's almost beautiful, the lines of his face are so graceful and regal..._ He remembers drowning in a terrible emptiness, speaking to Will and not knowing what he was saying, staring into a fire, thinking: _He has killed me. It was all a lie._

He remembers sitting on a bench in a museum in Florence, beneath a gorgeous achievement of humanity, Hannibal looking at him with such longing and sadness and love and resignation and he fingers the knife in his pocket and thinks: _If only...if only...in some other world..._ He remembers sitting in a glass cell like a special exhibit, sitting there and pacing and sitting there and sleeping and pacing and sitting there, for eternity, forever, opening books and closing them unread, pacing, and at night he dreams about Will, his profile silhouetted against the red light of the fireplace, or his breath billowing in the cold air, or his eyes, his eyes.

He remembers the ocean tossing below the cliff. He remembers saying, "This is all I ever wanted for you, Will. For both of us." He remembers saying, "It's beautiful." He remembers holding him—finally, finally—he remembers kissing him, and tasting blood, and falling, and not caring at all.

Will gasps, surfacing—he'd forgotten to breathe. Disoriented, he looks up at Hannibal, at the incredibly odd expression on his face. He looks like he's forgotten what he was saying in the middle of a sentence and is trying to recall the words. The memories flow freely between them _a gorgeous stately castle a ramshackle boat yard sweltering and thick with humidity snow snow snow a child's copper bathtub something huge and dark all feathers and fur a man's head sits mutilated on a stump something glints between his teeth Abigail is smiling so sadly next to his hospital bed an orange floating in steaming bathwater a cricket singing metallic in a little cage embroidered silk what is left in you to love M for—_

Hannibal rips away from him, nearly falling backwards off the bed. Will does not notice, his breathing is shallow, his eyes are rolling wildly in his head, his face is bloodless and damp with cold sweat. Hannibal swears, trying to regain his senses. Finally he gets up and reaches under the bed for his black medical bag. He grabs Will and drags him to the edge of the mattress, intending to walk him around, but before he can get him up Will vomits on himself, the bed, the floor and Hannibal sees he is unconscious.

He makes sure Will is not in danger of asphyxiating and sits down hard on the floor, well away from the pool of vomit, to catch his breath.

 

_"You are a student of psychology, Will. What causes a man to lose his heart?"_

_Will half-shrugs, fiddling with something on Hannibal's desk, not looking at him. "A great many things. Most severe disorders begin in childhood. A massive trauma, a shock that the developing personality cannot handle except by integration, or compartmentalization. Long-term sexual abuse. Being the witness or victim of domestic violence. War crimes."_

_He senses rather than sees Hannibal shudder, so subtly that he could believe he imagined it. Striking a nerve excites and disturbs him. He knows Hannibal knows this._

_"What was it that killed you, Dr. Lecter? You do not expect me to miss that we are speaking about you." He looks at Hannibal, piercing and pierced. "Something killed the man and left the body walking."_

_"Someday you will know," Hannibal says, expressionless. "Not today."_

_Will knows better than to push. He knows it because he hopes for that courtesy in others every day._

_"Then what are we discussing?"_

_"Trauma," says Hannibal simply. "The ghoul stalking through psychology's darkest dreams. A specter that haunts us both. Nothing transforms the human soul like trauma. It is alchemic."_

_"It rots you from the inside out."_

_"Have you arrested the stinking corruption of your soul, Will? Does trauma still gnaw your bones?"_

_"There is nothing left to eat." Will throws himself down into the opposite chair and stares at Hannibal. "A dry corpse, no moisture left to support bacterial growth. Mummified."_

_"You are skeletonized. The scavengers have been and gone." This time the reaction is confined to a tiny twitch below one eye. "The looters."_

_Will files each little hint away to have on hand for the day that Hannibal makes his confession, recites the litany of his early life to him. He knows that Hannibal does intend to tell him, someday when they reach the appropriate level of closeness. He feels privileged, knows somehow that he will then possess knowledge no one else alive has. But not today._

 

Sitting in a kitchen chair beside the bathtub, Hannibal laves the shallow water over Will's motionless body, washing away the vomit. When Will is clean, he drains the dirty water and begins to refill the tub with fresh. He wants to encourage Will's muscles to relax; often his episodes, panic attacks or otherwise, cause them to seize up and leave him sore for days.

 _His boundaries are so permeable,_ Hannibal reflects. He dips a washcloth into the bathwater and wrings it out. He wipes it over Will's face, gently scrubbing the sweat and tears from his cheeks, smoothing it over his forehead, his eyelids. Will's face is slack and for once his brow is untroubled. Even in sleep, usually, fear draws it into furrows.

Hannibal traces his scars, one by one. He knows Will's body like his own, but now as he touches each mark he can recall the pain of its creation. _The smile I gave you for crushing my heart_. _The puckered dimple left by the bullet Jack put in your shoulder in the Hobbs' kitchen. The red raised line that runs ragged down your cheek where the Dragon suspended you from his knife, lifted you off your feet._

_I knew this was a possible outcome of our experimentation, but hoped it would not be. I intended to tell you, if I could ever put it into words, but I did not want to show you. I did not ever intend you to see, feel, experience the hunting lodge, what I did to make it right. Or the Lady. Of her you may never have heard a whisper._

Things happen how they must happen, and Hannibal does not experience regret. He sits back in his chair to wait for Will to regain consciousness, passing the time by exploring the new rooms that have opened to him in Will's memory palace. They are very impressionistic—he does not know if this is because Will's ability to build solidly here is not as developed as his own, or if their appearance is a function of Will's own sensory style. Most rooms are dark, and echo, but when he stands in the doorways he can feel Will's emotions like a draft, rushing past his face, ruffling his hair. He opens one and steps inside.

_Loneliness, awful shameful loneliness, growing up poor and nomadic, always something between him and them. Always something that seems to fundamentally set him apart. It is not being new, although being new colors it. It is feeling things they cannot feel, sensing what is invisible and immaterial to them. He and they speak different languages: he can read them in ways they cannot not read him, but their facial expressions, their gestures, their intonations are meaningless to him. The wall between them is transparent but hard as diamond._

Hannibal takes a step back and closes the door.

 

Hannibal exits Will's memory palace into his own via the door to his Baltimore office. He knows at once that Will is in the house somewhere. Upstairs.

He finds Will in the master bedroom, stretched out across the king-size bed, barefoot and shirtless in old jeans. He is lying on his back with his fingers laced behind his head, lost in thought, but he notices immediately when Hannibal enters and says, "Hello."

"Hello." Hannibal removes his shoes and jacket and climbs into bed. "Am I disturbing you?"

"No. I wanted to experience lying in this bed, since I never got the chance." Will turns his eyes towards him. "I'm afraid that getting you naked in this bed and ruining your pristine sheets was a recurring fantasy in those years." He grins.

Hannibal raises an eyebrow. "For myself, during sessions I frequently debated bending you over the desk."

"Oh, I know," Will says, laughing. "It was obvious, for eyes that could see. Very unprofessional, Dr. Lecter." Hannibal smiles.

Will pulls him in and Hannibal nestles into the crook of his arm, resting his head on Will's chest.

"The memory palace is an orderly way of experiencing the past," Hannibal says. "Your method is rather more chaotic."

"My intention was to begin training myself to control it, rather than just unleash it," Will sighs. "But I was having too much fun not controlling it. Up until I wasn't."

Hannibal looks at him for a long moment. "Do you know everything?"

A pause. "Yes."

Hannibal closes his eyes and says nothing. Will holds him tighter.

"I'm...sorry...for what happened to her. And to you. And for...letting _this_ happen."

"You have nothing to apologize for. You burned, not me."

"I'm used to it," Will says, with his crooked smile. "I've cut myself on the sharp edges of your mind more times than I can count." He is silent for a few seconds.

"But if you're willing, I want to finish what we started."

 

"I will attempt to rein it in, restrict it to physical sensations and immediate emotion," Will says, "but I can't make any guarantees about what will happen."

"One never can."

"True enough."

They kiss, and immediately Hannibal is hit with a towering wave of emotion: he _feels_ it, feels Will's love for him, its development from confusion and shame through self-loathing and hatred to acceptance, surrender, _I can't fight anymore I want to see what it's like I want to know what it feels like to be loved so completely, so all-consumingly, I want to love him I want to burn._ Pressing his hand against the glass. Making his decision. Letting his old self fall away. Becoming.

Will twists and moans entering being entered again, feeling how good he feels to Hannibal, feeling Hannibal's own wordless primal love for him glowing inside him, his need, the way it illuminates the corners of his mind, the way it burns in that cold place like a solitary lantern, pride of place _my only love, my Will_ and each wave of pleasure he feels is doubled and amplified between them and they can't possibly last long at this but they have to see, have to know, have to take this all the way.

Already someone is close, so close, but Will can't tell if it is himself or Hannibal, he doubts one of them can come like this without the other. His breathing faster, faster, Hannibal moans and nearly doubles over, overwhelmed by Will's pleasure, struggling to keep thrusting, his body ready to give out, the rising tensions of two orgasms coiled in the muscles of his hips. Will can feel himself dissolving he feels so impossibly high he pushes deeper deeper feels Hannibal so far inside him so taut around him the glow the burn the reciprocal vibrations—

It is the most intense physical sensation he's ever experienced, stronger than Hannibal knifing him in the gut or Mason Verger's filthy brand searing his flesh or the perverse surge of power when he shot Garrett Jacob Hobbs or the first time Will laughed at something he said or the first time they kissed and for a moment they're both blind with it, there's nothing to hold on to, they're drowning again and again it doesn't matter at all. The comedown is slow and gradually Will becomes aware that they're still entangled, gripping each other tight enough to leave bruises, holding on for dear life.

Will starts laughing. Hannibal, dripping sweat, chuckles weakly and rubs his forehead against Will's, one more kiss, lets go and drops to the mattress beside him, utterly and completely exhausted. Will doesn't know why he's laughing but he can't stop, he puts his forearm over his eyes and holds his stomach, curling on to his side, and laughs until he cries. Hannibal closes his eyes and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> So I was minding my own business writing a completely different fic when this started to happen & I was like "This is not at all the fic I'm writing but I think it IS a fic that I need to write." So I did and I think I'm happy with it. I wanted to go stream-of-consciousness and kind of see if I could translate the infamous "kaleidoscope" sex scenes from the show into writing. I feel like once the show made it canon that Will and Hannibal can literally chill in each other's memory palaces, basically inside each other's heads, this became less of a far-fetched idea haha. Like we're not dealing in realism on the show so let's deal in surrealism right? Also I just read Hannibal Rising and I'm sure that's pretty evident if you're familiar with it.
> 
> Also as I was writing I was like "man I wish I could do this in real life" and then I realized...I have. On acid. I once experienced this exact thing on acid and it was fucking amazing. Highly recommended.
> 
> I live for your comments so please leave me some & tell me what you liked!!! And follow me on Tumblr at stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com <3


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